Asylum seekers continue to flood into Austria

Hundreds of refugees on Saturday waited at Budapest East Station to catch the trains to Hegyeshalom, a town near the Austrian border.

After the Austrian authorities stopped international trains from Vienna to Budapest, this is the only way for the refugees to get to Western Europe.

About ten trains were scheduled to leave Budapest on Saturday but the fate of those refugees depended on the number of vacancies on those trains as ordinary passengers are served first.

On Friday, about 5,000 of them boarded these trains.

As thousands are trying to leave, many more are coming. According to Hungarian Migrant Agency, more than 3,000 illegal migrants entered the country on Friday alone. And the country has seen a total 180,000 this year, with 160,000 of whom trying to seek asylum. Meanwhile, about 1,000 human traffickers have been detained.

As the most of the refugees enter the country from its southern border with Serbia, the Hungarian authorities started building a 175-kilometer long, 4-meter high fence along the border.

And the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban replaced his Defense Minister for the slow building process.

Hungary’s unfriendly stance toward refugees has drawn criticism from other European countries. In an interview with German news magazine Der Spiegel, Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann likened Hungarian Prime Minister Orban’s treatment of refugees to the Nazis’deportation of Jews and others to concentration camps.